Real Choice in Games is not Imminent
Games have long had a fascination with morality. New games continue to promise ‘aggressively grey’ decisions and end up with dilemmas such as whether to burn a busload of children or feed starving orphans. Why do games continually fail at what would seem to be a simple task?
Is it that hard to offer branching paths that aren’t quite so clear cut? As we will see, it’s not nearly as simple as that. To understand why real choice in games isn’t imminent, however, we must first analyze the ways in which past games have failed.
Color change is not choice
I get it. I acted like an ass, and now I have horns and the sky turned red. Developers seem to imagine that being evil is solely about appearance. Black and White, Infamous, Fable and every Jedi game ever fall into this category. It’s too bad that the worst thing that happens to me, the loathed demon man who burned the sky, is that the occasional peasant throws a rock at me. Quest givers don’t seem to care and they still need me to collect 9 boar tusks.
Quick quiz: is this guy good or evil?
NPCs abandoning you is not choice
You can either free this witch or kill her. If you free her, your anti-witch advocate is going to get annoyed and leave. I guess we’ll kill her … except then your pro-witch teammate will leave. This is not an interesting moral choice on its own, so the developer’s solution is to elevate the stakes by forcing you to choose between teammates in which you’ve already invested significant resources. This is like experience loss from death in MMORPGs; it’s not fun. I’m looking in your direction, Bioware.
Branching ability trees is not choice
Labeling one skill tree ‘virtuous’ and the other ‘wicked’ is no different from calling one tree ‘warrior’ and the other ‘mage.’ It’s even less of a choice when you realize going down the wicked path gives you access to lightning, fire and a spell called ‘the doombringer,’ while becoming virtuous allows you to summon a wisp to illuminate caves and use your pan flute to soothe enemy anger.
Watch out Ogre Mage, here comes the crescendo!
What would real choice look like?
Real choice would mean being evil doesn’t merely cause store prices to increase because your charisma decreases. Real choice means you can make Link join with Ganon as his right hand man. Real choice means you decided you like The Covenant agenda after all and maybe it’s time for Master Chief to get paid instead of fighting all the time. Real choice means you can completely reverse the plot and the implications in terms of iterative gameplay and alternate endings are staggering. Real choice also means that you won’t be able to tell which decision is the ‘bad’ decision and which one is the ‘good’ one. You merely have two different paths. Both lead somewhere different, and both have their own set of benefits and consequences.
Why we’re not about to have real choice
I think it is self-evident why real choice is not around the corner. Developers have a limited amount of time to make a game and the costs are already skyrocketing. Allowing you to massively diverge from the existing plot would mean they have to generate far more game content. In addition, it’s low return game content as it’s not even certain that the player will see it. This would increase development time and stretch already thin resources even further.
Look at how badass this is. Do they really think I would 'choose' not to have it?
Would consumers accept a situation where they had to pay $100 instead of $60 for a game that has real moral choices? Developers are making nearly two games, it’s only logical to charge nearly double the price. To get full value from the game, you’d essentially have to play it through twice and you’d better be sure you’re going to want to do that to justify the cost. The divergence between AAA titles and the rest of the industry that we’ve seen over the past couple years would become even greater, and innovation would vanish as developers wouldn’t be willing to try something new when they already have the equivalent of two games on the line.
I don’t think this is a realistic scenario as neither consumers nor developers would be receptive to this state of affairs. I think it’s far more likely that real ethical choices will only emerge once automatically generated gameplay is a real option. We’ve already seen some moves in that direction with Diablo 3’s automatic dungeons. When technology progresses to where automatic generation can control plot, and simulated character AI routines are sophisticated enough to realistically react to your unexpected decisions, we will have real choice.
Until then, anticipate nothing more than increasingly complicated gimmicks that still boil down to black or white.
I’m interested in your thoughts on the matter. Hit up the comments!
